The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)

China has passed the United States in the total number of top ranked supercomputers, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from fourth to fifth on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The TOP500 list is released twice a year, once in June and once in November. It is based on a benchmark test known as Linpack.

Titan at ORNL dropped from third to fourth in June, bumped from the number three spot by the upgraded Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Titan is capable of 17.59 petaflops. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Piz Daint is capable of 19.59 petaflops.

That power is useful in scientific research. At ORNL, Titan is used for research in areas such as materials science, nuclear energy, combustion, and climate science. ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.

Titan slipped one more spot in this month’s list, from fourth to fifth. It was displaced by the upgraded Gyoukou supercomputer. That is a ZettaScaler-2.2 system capable of 19.14 petaflops and deployed at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the home of the Earth Simulator. [Read more…]

A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration has named a new director of the project to build computing systems that are at least 50 times faster than the nation’s most powerful supercomputers in use today—and the new director will be based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The collaborative project is the Exascale Computing Project. It’s a collaboration between DOE’s Office of Science and the NNSA, which is a semi-autonomous agency within DOE.

The new director is Doug Kothe, a 32-year veteran of DOE’s national laboratory system who most recently served in ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate and as the applications development lead for the Exascale Computing Project, or ECP. For the preceding five years, he led the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub, which uses supercomputers to improve nuclear reactor performance.

Kothe will be ECP director effective October 1. He will replace Paul Messina, who is stepping down after two years to return to Argonne National Laboratory, a press release said. [Read more…]

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was once ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, but it is now ranked number four. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

Note: This story was updated at 10:40 a.m.

Once the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory dropped to number four on a list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers released Monday.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system, was bumped from the number three spot by the upgraded Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

China continues to have the world’s two most powerful supercomputers.

The TOP50 List of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is based on a benchmark test known as Linpack. The list is released twice each year, once in June and again in November. The 49th edition of the TOP500 List was released Monday in conjunction with the opening session of the ISC High Performance conference, which is taking place this week in Frankfurt, Germany. [Read more…]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has received funding from a federal project to develop applications for more powerful supercomputers, systems that could be 50 to 100 times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers.

The project is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, or ECP. It’s to develop applications for future exascale systems. Exascale refers to high-performance computing systems capable of at least a billion billion calculations per second, which is up to 100 times faster than the nation’s most powerful supercomputers in use today, a press release said.

The work on applications will help guide DOE’s development of a U.S. exascale ecosystem as part of President Barack Obama’s National Strategic Computing Initiative, or NSCI, the press release said.

The first round of ECP funding totals $39.8 million for 22 proposals representing teams from 45 research and academic organizations. ORNL researchers and technical staff will participate in 12 of the 22 projects.

The awards, announced Wedneday, target advanced modeling and simulation solutions to specific challenges supporting key DOE missions in science, clean energy, and national security, as well as collaborations such as the Precision Medicine Initiative with the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, the press release said. [Read more…]

Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012 but is now ranked No. 3. (File photo courtesy ORNL/October 2013)

China maintained its number one ranking in the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, but with a new system built entirely using processors designed and made in China.

China now has the top two supercomputers on the semiannual TOP500 list, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from number two to number three.

The new Chinese supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, is capable of 93 petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second, a press release said.

It displaced Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that had claimed the number one spot on the past six TOP500 lists. Tianhe-2 achieved a speed of 33.86 petaflops, or more than 33,000 trillion calculations per second, in a test known as the LINPACK benchmark.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, achieved 17.59 petaflops.

The latest list marks the first time since the start of the TOP500 that the United States is not home to the largest number of systems. With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the U.S. is second with 165. China also leads the performance category, thanks to the number one and number two systems, the press release said. [Read more…]

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was once ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, but it has since been ranked number two. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained at number two on a list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers released Monday. China tripled the number of its systems on the semiannual Top500 list, while the number of systems in the United States fell to the lowest point since the list was created in 1993.

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China again maintained the number one spot on the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. It’s the sixth consecutive time Tianhe-2 has been the top supercomputer. The system was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.

Titan was once the most powerful supercomputer.

The 46th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was released Monday. [Read more…]

Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012 but is now ranked No. 2. (Photos courtesy of ORNL/File photo October 2013)

For the fifth consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s number one system, according to the 45th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, led the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (or quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.

At number two was Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan, the top system in the United States and one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list, achieved 17.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.

The only new entry in the Top 10 supercomputers on the latest list is at number seven—Shaheen II is a Cray XC40 system installed at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, in Saudi Arabia. Shaheen II achieved 5.536 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, making it the highest-ranked Middle East system in the 22-year history of the list and the first to crack the Top 10. [Read more…]

KNOXVILLE—The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report through its Office of Science detailing the Top 10 research challenges in reaching the level of exascale computing, once again calling on Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a press release said.

Dongarra—a distinguished professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory and one of five National Academy of Engineering members at UT—has long been at the forefront of exascale computing, or computing at roughly a thousand times the capability of recent supercomputers.

An icon in his field, Dongarra is a lead author of the Top500, a list he helped start in 1993 to measure the world’s fastest computers as well as numerous software packages for high-performance computing. [Read more…]

Professor also ORNL researcher, co-author of Top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers

KNOXVILLE—The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report co-chaired by Jack Dongarra, a distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, in which he stresses the importance of prioritizing research into high-end mathematics to help keep the United States on the cutting edge of computing.

“Exascale computing (capable of one quintillion floating point operations per second) will enable us to solve problems in ways that are not feasible today and will result in significant scientific breakthroughs,” said Dongarra, of UT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “However, the transition to exascale poses numerous scientific and technological challenges.”

Dongarra, one of five National Academy of Engineering members on the faculty of UT’s College of Engineering, said that increased funding for the development of new models and ways of gathering data is key to unlocking a number of those challenges. [Read more…]

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced 59 scientific projects that will share nearly six billion core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers, including the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pictured above. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced 59 projects, promising to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, that will share nearly six billion core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers dedicated to open science. Their work will advance knowledge in critical areas from sustainable energy technologies to the environmental consequences of energy use.

The allocations come from the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. Through it, the world’s most advanced computational research projects from academia, government, and industry are given access to DOE’s leadership computing facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories. [Read more…]

The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

KNOXVILLE—Imagine going to the doctor and the doctor peering into your genetic code to determine the best medicine to treat what ails you.

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville has received funding from computer chip maker Intel to develop computer codes to make personalized medicine like this and other transformative scientific discoveries possible.

The funding will open an Intel Parallel Computing Center at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, or JICS, at UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Parallel computing, used in supercomputers, is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. The focus of the center will be to take supercomputing to the next level to meet scientific computing demands. Today’s research faces limitations due to the amount of data, time, and energy it takes to run calculations. [Read more…]